Bruce Arians makes Arizona Cardinals game-plan early birds

If the Cardinals beat the San Francisco 49ers this Sunday, they just might be able to chalk it up to all the extra chalk-talk Bruce Arians and his coaching staff does early in the week, specifically on Mondays.

That’s when the heart of the team’s planning and preparation for the next game begins to take shape — about a day and half before most NFL teams even start to dissect the opposition and install actual game-day play sheets.

The Cardinals feel it’s a big reason they have won seven of their past eight and have a chance to finish the season 11-5.

“Monday’s a huge day for our staff; some staffs are different,” Arians said. “… We put in more time, especially offensively on a Monday night, than most teams do.”

It’s a concept Arians said he developed about five years ago as offensive coordinator for the Steelers. Advance scouts would have game film on the next opponent broken down and distributed nine days early. Arians and his assistants would then work well into Monday night to have the running game, the base defense and the blitzing schemes installed, and highlight any new tendencies being employed by the opposing team.

“That way we can roll through Tuesday where we can spend more time on situational football,” Arians said.

It’s called time management and Arians and the Cardinals appear to be using it to their full advantage. When the coaches have crunched out their data, it is forwarded to every player on their iPads for consumption.

“Sometimes you have some coaching staffs where changes are still happening on the fly on Wednesday,” starting right tackle Eric Winston said, “so that’s something I really respect about this coaching staff — is that when you come in on Wednesday you have all the information and it’s all pretty much done.

“Now obviously if something doesn’t look good in practice, they might get rid of it or they might tweak it a little bit. But you know what you’re getting here. Before I go to bed Tuesday night, I can flip through my iPad to see what’s coming in and what the plan is.”

That wasn’t the case last season when Winston played for the 2-14 Chiefs.

“Yeah, they’d put a lot of the game plan in on Wednesday and then weeded a lot of it out,” Winston said. “I didn’t really like that because on Wednesday you’d end up practicing a lot of stuff you might not be using in the game.

“But what you notice with these coaches here is they don’t burn the midnight oil trying to reinvent the wheel every week.”

What Arians and his staff do for the offense, Winston said, is make it both efficient and deceptive by finding multiple formations out of which to run virtually the same play.

“To defenses, it looks like we’re running something totally different,” he said. “But what’s even better is that way you can keep using the same techniques that you’ve been practicing over and over, and we’re getting better and better because of it.”

The running game in particular has been gaining steam and Cardinals players believe it has a lot to do with exactly Winston’s point. Familiarization, they said, has allowed them to go from averaging 77.7 rushing yards per game in their first seven games of the season to 114.1 in their past eight.

“Every time we go into games, I almost feel like we’re over-prepared now,” rookie running back Andre Ellington said. “We’re ready more than you could know. We never lack any plays going into any of our games.”

Fellow rookie running back Stepfan Taylor said the coaches’ “head start” helps in other ways, too.

“They’re on it so early that as you go through the week everything gets a lot simpler,” he said. “Plus, if you make a mistake early in the week, you can fix it the next day rather than having to correct it on Friday.”

Arians refuses to take any credit, saying it’s the players who have bought into the system and have chosen to work hard for each other. Larry Fitzgerald agreed.

“These guys do a really good job of getting us ready every single week,” the wide receiver said of the coaches, “but it’s also the players. We want to be good, we want to be great. We want to be prepared and we want to be able to go out and execute on Sundays. It goes both ways. If the players don’t put in the time, it doesn’t matter what information the coaches give you. But the guys in this locker room really care. The coaches really want to see us do well, the guys want to do well, and it makes a good combination.”

The rhythm they’ve developed during the week has carried over to game days, where the Cardinals feel they now should be considered among NFC’s elite. Their defense is ranked sixth overall, including first in the league against the run (84.5), and the offense is on pace to finish with the fifth-most points (382) in franchise history.

“I sure do. I sure do,” Arians said when asked whether the Cardinals consider themselves the best team in the conference. “And hopefully we’ll show up Sunday and prove it and get a chance to prove it in the playoffs.”

For that to happen, Arizona needs to beat San Francisco (11-4) and hope the Saints lose or tie at home against the Buccaneers to make the playoffs.

But however it ends, the Cardinals know they’re headed in the right direction and a lot of it is because they are so well-prepared week to week.

“Yeah, Carson and I were joking about it the other day saying, ‘God, what’s camp going to be like next year when you’re not trying to figure out every protection scheme and what call you have to make for this and that?’ ” Winston said.

“That’s when you can get down to the little stuff and you can really work on detailed things. … Those are things that once you get to where we are now, you start improving on and that’s when it gets really fun because now it’s just muscle memory. That’s what all this is about, efficiency and consistency.”

Notes

Linebacker John Abraham (groin) was the only Cardinals player who missed practice on Thursday. “Limited” were left guard Daryn Colledge (back), safety Rashad Johnson (ankle) and inside linebacker Daryl Washington (ankle).

— The Pro Bowl rosters will be announced Friday night and at least four Cardinals are in the conversation: linebacker Karlos Dansby, defensive end Calais Campbell, cornerback Patrick Peterson and special-teams gunner Justin Bethel. The selections will be made on the NFL Network beginning at 7 p.m.

— The Cardinals-49ers game is sold out and will be televised live on Channel 10. Including preseason and postseason, the Cardinals have now sold out all 83 games they have played at University of Phoenix Stadium, which opened in August 2006.

Posting a comment to our website allows you to join in on the conversation. Share your story and unique perspective with members of the azcentral.com community.

Comments posted via facebook:

► Join the Discussion

Join the conversation! To comment on azcentral.com, you must be logged into an active personal account on Facebook. You are responsible for your comments and abuse of this privilege will not be tolerated. We reserve the right, without warning or notification, to remove comments and block users judged to violate our Terms of Service and Rules of Engagement. Facebook comments FAQ

Join thousands of azcentral.com fans on Facebook and get the day's most popular and talked-about Valley news, sports, entertainment and more - right in your newsfeed. You'll see what others are saying about the hot topics of the day.